Theorizing l’objet technique: reconciling the disparity between emerging “maker culture” and traditional “design/build”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper contributes to emerging phenomenon of maker culture and open source technology by proposing a theoretical vision that can help interpret the complexity of this developing global phenomenon and consider the far reaching implications it holds for traditional localized cultures of making in building arts. Contexturalized by principles of the social construction of technology (SCOT), the paper draws from two theories: Brian Stross’ cycle of hybridity as applied to the origins of innovation and the theory of technical individuation and concretization proposed by continental philosopher Gilbert Simondon in his mode d ’ existence de l ’ objet technique. This paper anticipates discourse grounded in a six-year action-research project into educational “design/build” in schools of architecture. It hopes to provoke a theoretical basis for exchange of resources specific to building arts, but influenced by distributed networks of “open source” technical exchange and collaborations based in maker culture. It aspires to a new model of architectural thinking induced by “design/build” pedagogy: learning by doing, doing it yourself, but most importantly, doing it by collaboration, situated within the emergent technologies of networked communications and fabrication. We situate the tradition of design/build as discrete building projects, built by students, academics and community groups within an academic but alternative to the mainstream professional education in architecture. A long-standing tradition, it generates hands-on experience to embody project synthesis. Design is continuous rather than predetermined. Communities (often in need) work with designer/builders to learn techniques through first-hand tacit knowledge. Though rarely discussed, design/build positions itself as an alternative to standard economic structure, to building industry norms, and to the lack of collaboration in design. This is fertile ground, particularly now when technological change presents opportunities of industrial accessibility, networked communications and alternative economic collaborative models, such as the open source “maker labs” and cloud-funding. Both SCOT and the theory of the technical object treat invention as stabilization and closure. Simondon’s theory follows the course of invention as individuating phenomena resulting from collision or chance occurrences between stabilizations underlining tendencies towards stabilization through concretization of inventions. Stross’ theory suggests that hybrids form in a competitive environment and refinements, ostensibly for competition, make processes more susceptible to combination with competitors. In both cases innovation originates from a process of continuous refinement and combination. Some unexpectedly meld to form discrete modes of fabrication. Stross warns us that diverse techniques can become homogeneous and resistant to further combination through hybridization. While the ethic of “maker culture” and “design build” seem parallel, they are quite removed. There is potential for a hybrid emergence of these two cultures. On the face of it, it contradicts the principles of “open” source. However, it is possible to do both — allow closure (produce objects) while keeping the process and constituent products open to recombination. The aim of this paper is to build a theoretical framework that might reconcile the architectural (professional - public infrastructure) with the communal and dispersed model of maker culture and open-sourced technology both theoretically and practically.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".